TJam

Online grocery shopping is a given for all the supermarket giants. Tesco.com wanted new ways to re-invest the now familiar experience with some excitement, while helping their customers weather the current climate by making their online grocery shopping cheaper, easier and faster.

Creating applications in-house costs time and money. T-Jam gave Tesco access to the creativity of 150+ developers, all with the fresh insight of 'interested outsiders'. In turn, by being part of an affiliates' scheme, developers benefit financially from any successful new applications created by them.

Facilitated by Happen, T-Jam was designed to encourage and capture insights from current customers, which were then voted on and presented to the developers, who took them away as their raw material.

The winner was the T-Scanner, a notional key-ring device that collects barcodes to build up a 'favourites list' of products which the customer can rely on and refer to.

Other ideas which required applications rather than hardware included a phone app (suitable for any model or make) which greatly simplified mobile shopping. Another front-runner was a 3D virtual Tesco grocery store which the customer could tour as they shopped.

Tesco.com is now busy developing its application programming interface and working with the many successful T-Jam developers. Up-to-date information can be found at Tesco.com's innovation support forum: www.techfortesco.com/forum.

T-Jam delivered viable and relevant ideas fresh from the imagination of outside developers and at a fraction of the cost of developing them in-house.